kaymac Lyotard

I have to admit, I felt like an idiot reading this. I understood each word individually, but when those words were strung together I was completely lost. But the overall feeling I got from this reading was that avant gardism is why the novel and painting were lost. In our efforts to simplify and/or tear apart what has been perceived as beautiful for the past six hundred years or so the actual art/technique of painting/writing a novel has been lost. But then with this, is it time to change?

So here's the interesting quote that I found in this reading, which helped me understand the piece. "Here, then, lies the difference: modern aesthetics is an aesthetic of the sublime, though a nostalgic one. It allows the unpresentable to be put forward only as the missing contents; but the form, because of its recognizable consistency,continues to offer the reader or viewer matter for solace and pleasure. Yet these sentiments do not constitute the real sublime sentiment, which is an intrinsic combination of pleasure and pain: the pleasure that reason should exceed all presentation, the pain that imagination or sensibility should not be equal to the concept (46)."

What is the sublime? In this, I believe that the sublime is the beautiful, and when he says nostalgic, I think he means traditional, i.e. Renaissance-like painting and art, naturalistic. When he talks about the unpresentable, I think he means the art that has been "ruined" by avant gardism. So because modern aesthetics are nostalgic, it's calling for something new, and therefore avant gardism has been brought into the picture in order to fill that gap. And with the rest of what he says, because we accept this art form to fill the gap we call this art beautiful but instead it's more of an empty hole that we are trying to fill with sawdust. I think he's saying that we're losing our minds, which I beg to differ.